April 13



THE NETHERLANDS:

Nazi-Era Profiteering


Holland Returns Art Stolen from a Jewish Collector

Marei von Saher, daughter-in-law of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker,
has successfully reclaimed works first stolen by Nazi officials and then
quietly appropriated by the Dutch government. The case sets a ticklish
precedent for museums in Holland.

Jews once led a happy life in Holland. "Is there any other country where
you can eat your Passover lamb so peacefully, where you can break as many
twigs off trees to build your Pesach hut?" asked poet Karl Gutzkow in his
1834 novella "The Sadducee of Amsterdam."

The question was rhetorical; everyone at the time knew Holland to be a
stronghold of tolerance, which is why so many Sephardim Jews settled
there. But 100 years later, the refugees who returned to Holland from Nazi
concentration camps in the East weren't always greeted with quite the same
openness and acceptance. In some cases, in fact, Dutch Jews returning from
Nazi camps were told the property they had left behind would be used to
pay off back taxes that had not been paid while they were out of the
country.

Dsi Goudstikker, widow of the Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, was
lucky. When she returned after 1945, The Hague declared the remains of the
Goudstikker collection -- originally 1,113 paintings -- enemy property:
The paintings had fallen into the hands of Nazi honcho and Hitler
confidante Hermann Gring. But she was allowed to keep her house in
Amsterdam and her castle near Breukelen -- and she was still well-off
enough to buy back some of the more important paintings.

Half a century later, the Goudstikker's have finally been able to reclaim
the rest of the collection. The government of Minister-President Jan Peter
Balkenende has revoked a court decision from 1952 and promised
compensation.

"We're losing a substantial part of our collection," says Alexander von
Grevenstein, director of Maastricht's Bonnefanten Museum. He has had to
give up almost 40 works that once belonged to Goudstikker. But more
important than the Goudstikker case is the precedent the ruling may set.
After all, Dutch museums are stuffed full of works appropriated from
private owners.

Jacques Goudstikker escaped from Amsterdam on May 14, 1940, four days
after the German invasion, in order to seek asylum in England. But his
luck didn't hold. Travelling on the SS Bodegraven, he fell into a cargo
hatch and broke his neck and his small, black notebook was found on his
corpse. In it, he had listed the name of every oil painting in his
collection.

Two months later, the Goudstikker collection -- the most important in
Holland -- was "Aryanized." Formally, it became the property of German
banker Alois Miedl. But 779 paintings were instantly claimed by Hermann
Gring, and the rest landed on the auction block.

Miedl paid 550,000 guilders for his company's new assets while Gring paid
2 million guilders. The actual value of the collection is still a matter
of debate, but all can agree that it was far more than Miedl and Gring
shelled out. Legally, though, the case is a difficult one; the paintings
were neither rightfully purchased nor were they stolen outright.

One of the principle questions is whether the deal was made under duress.
After all, Goudstikker was not an art collector but an art dealer. He had
always considered his paintings as merchandise meant for the market.
Furthermore, Goudstikker's widow, who held a 15 percent share of his
business, had explicitly approved the sale of the paintings.

Still though, the buyer in this case, Hermann Gring, raises eyebrows. He
was, during World War II, an active art dealer and one of the nation's
most voracious collectors. By 1945, he had bought about 1,800 works for
his private collection. But he also ruthlessly exploited his substantial
political weight in order to put pressure on his business partners. Jewish
art dealers and collectors who sold on his conditions could expect to be
allowed to flee the country.

The banker Alois Miedl profited too. Towards the end of the war, Spanish
authorities seized 22 valuable paintings that he had deposited in a shed
in the port of Bilbao. More paintings were later found in the safe of a
Swiss bank.

Banks didn't play a pretty role in the expropriation of the Jews,
including Dutch banks. Though they claim to have followed a policy of
passive resistance, the opposite was in fact true, says Gerald Aalders, a
historian at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam.
Almost all major banks purchased Jewish artworks and stocks at cut-rate
prices, including the predecessors of the two largest banks active in the
Netherlands today, ING and ABN Amro Bank.

(source: Der Spiegel)






POLAND:

Poland wants Auschwitz renamed


Poland is trying to change the name of Auschwitz concentration camp to
emphasize that Nazi Germans, not Poles, were responsible for the most
murderous center of the Holocaust.

The government has asked the United Nations to change the name of its
World Heritage site from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "the Former
Nazi German Concentration Camp of Auschwitz," despite criticism of the
move by some Jewish groups.

Warsaw is incensed by references in foreign media to the "Polish
concentration camp" and "Polish gas chambers" to describe the Nazi
Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps.

"We cannot continue to ignore repeated publications that defame Poland,"
said Jan Kasprzyk, a Culture Ministry official.

"The new name is completely accurate. By stating who was the perpetrator
of a war that ended more than 60 years ago, honest mistakes could be
avoided," Kasprzyk added.

Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at the site, which
remains at the heart of sometimes tense Polish-Jewish relations.

Maram Stern from World Jewish Congress accused Warsaw of seeking "to
redefine history by changing the (Auschwitz) name," comments which stirred
uproar in Poland.

"Although the camp had been built and run by Nazi Germany, everyone in
the area had known about its existence and workers were recruited from
the Polish population in the neighboring village," Stern said in a
statement.

The Polish government denies the recruitment allegation and says Allied
powers could have done more to halt the genocide by bombing the camp by
plane.

Most Jewish groups said a name switch would not change much.

"People who say Auschwitz is a Polish death camp are either stupid or
illiterate ... but you need to teach them instead of confusing them,"
Shevah Weiss, a former Israeli Ambassador to Warsaw and commentator on
Polish-Jewish issues, told Reuters.

COMMUNIST "ANTI-SEMITISM"

"Changing the name of Auschwitz is nonsense, just like saying Auschwitz
is a Polish concentration camp," said Marek Edelman, the last living
leader of the wartime uprising by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto against the
occupying Nazis.

"It only provokes conflicts and disputes which should not exist."

Government officials have criticized the wording of articles on Auschwitz
by the New York Times and Britain's Guardian. The Guardian issued a
correction last year after referring to "Polish gas chambers and
crematoria."

For some Jews, the line taken by Poland's ruling communists in the 1940s
and 1950s, that Auschwitz was a place of martyrdom of Poles and other
nations as much as Jews, revealed widespread anti-Semitism in Poland
and raised suspicions of Polish complicity with the Nazi plan to
exterminate European Jewry.

Bitter feelings were reinforced by accounts of Poles helping to kill or
capture Jews, as well as postwar pogroms of those who survived as they
returned to their towns.

Many in Poland are outraged by accusations of complicity with the Nazis,
who killed 3 million non-Jewish Poles and razed Warsaw. They say thousands
of Poles risked their lives to save Jews and many were killed by the
Nazis for it.

Poles are the largest group awarded Israel's Righteous Among the Nations
title for helping to save Jews.

(source: Reuters)